Do You Write Linearly or are You a Hopper?

I just want to share an oddity of mine. I’ve been doing an editing pass on my novel,
and every time I go from the end of the story to the beginning, it takes me a
minute to reset myself, to remember that my characters and their relationships
with each other are different at the beginning than they are at the end. It makes me feel good about the story because
I can see that relationships have developed and characters have changed.

I’ve heard this advice before that you don’t have to
write the story linearly (even if the plot is linear), that you can hop around
and write the scene that most excites you.
I read that Stephenie Meyers wrote Twilight this way (I know Twilight
again). She would write the scene that
she most wanted to write until she had all of the important scenes, and then
strung them all together. I’m not saying
that this isn’t great advice. If it
works, it works. But I can’t write that
way.

I’ve tried to skip over scenes before, and I can’t. I just don’t work that way. Every scene changes the character a little
bit, and I can’t move on to the next scene until I’ve gotten the characters to the right emotional state. I’m not
saying every scene needs to be perfect, far from it; I only need to know where the character ends up, so I know where he or she is in the next scene.

Sometimes this can be a little frustrating because I can get stuck on one scene for weeks, and there are times when I think I should
just skip over it and come back to it, but I can’t. Believe me I’ve tried. That's just the way I write.

I’m curious if other writers have this problem. So tell me about you? Do you have to write the story linearly or
can you hop around from scene to scene?

15 comments:

I'm a linear writer too. I'd love to hop from scene to scene (especially when I'm stuck), but the characters and what they know change too much. Plus, since I'm a seat-of-the-pants writer, the small things that happen in between the big scenes frequently change what I think is going to happen.

I wish I could write the other way--I think it would be quicker (and easier?), but that's just not the way my brain works.

When I first started writing, I jumped around a lot. It never got me very far, because if I didn't want to write a scene, that usually meant I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere. I went through like 3 or 4 stories that way, never finishing any of them. I got sick of having a lot of open-ended projects that weren't much more than a handful of unconnected scenes, so my next project had to be written from beginning to end. Sometimes it was torture, but I finished that project in about 3 weeks. My next project took a few months, but I forced myself to write that one without hopping around, and I finished it, too. It's getting harder to power through the slow spots, but I would rather take a year to finish something, than burn myself out just writing the fun parts. I wish I had the dedication it takes to jump around and then come back for the tie-in scenes, but I've learned from experience that I don't have that kind of drive.

When world building though, I do jump from one scene to the next, but once I've got the daydream in order and sit down to start writing the story, I usually get stuck at the beginning. It's hard to find just the right beginning, isn't it? I do hop around from scene to scene trying to figure out which start is the right one, but once I have a firm beginning, I HAVE to write the story linearly.

BTW it's gorgeous outside here at my new house. We should hang out so i can pretend all these boxes aren't real for a little while more.

Sign me up for linear, though I often think of things that I either forgot, or things I now need to put in the past pages and hop back and forth filling those in. I'm a hoppy-editor, perhaps.~Just JIOll

I used to write scenes individually, but then I had the problem of getting too attached to certain scenes that ended up not fitting. Now I write linearly - though I will still write out important bits and save them in a separate file. It's amazing how much less attached I become to those words when they're kept apart from the developing story.

I've found that even when I write linearly, there are still some scenes that I love that really need to go. Cutting them is always tough. I like the idea of writing out some important scenes in a separate file. Maybe next time I get stuck I could try that.

I write linearly. But like Sabrina, every now and then a scene demands to be written out of place. I'm thinking of a scene in a swimming pool that I wrote recently (Sheena and Sabrina know what I'm talking about.) I doubt it will ever really end up in the story. But it was awfully fun to write. After a few days, I get less attached to those scenes, although pieces of them often end up scattered into other scenes. I think there is value in that. Besides, it's fun.

The trouble comes when I send them to someone else to read, in the heat of the moment.